Paper by Rita Flattley
Why take the trouble of developing and/or using visual materials for teaching, when most of us educated through the "chalk and talk" method seem to have made it through the formal education system just fine? The answer that I have heard most frequently made to this question makes unsubstantiated references to the "MTV generation" and implies that any auditory message longer than a sound byte is wasted on the young. This argument has not impressed me with either its thoughtfulness or its usefulness in education, so this paper represents a further exploration of the question.
One of the terms gaining notice in education today is visual literacy, defined as "the ability to 'read' and understand that which is seen and the ability to generate materials that have to be seen to be understood" (Wileman, 1980.) The popularity of graphical computer and telecommunications interfaces for information (Jobs, 1996) and our ability to transmit and display both realistic images and graphical representations of information (Kaufmann & Smarr, 1993) is providing an impetus for educators to come to a deeper understanding of the role of visualization in learning.
The use of visual materials for may be especially valuable for certain exceptional and multicultural learners who may have difficulties learning through the dominant spoken and/or written language. Students who are deaf are most obviously at a disadvantage in a classroom where most instruction is delivered verbally, since "even an expert lipreader can perceive only 30 - 40% of the sounds of spoken English" (Northcentral Technical College [NTC], 1993) and the student may be relying on a sign language interpreter to keep up a simultaneous translation of the verbal instruction in class. "Since vision is a deaf person's primary channel to receive information . . . visual aids are a tremendous help" (NTC, 1993) to these students.
However, the simple ability to hear does not guarantee that a student will be able to learn effectively through oral language. Students for whom English is a second language are also at a disadvantage when most instruction is given verbally, since research indicates that children develop "cognitive - academic language proficiency in about five to seven years" as opposed to the two years it usually takes to develop basic interpersonal communicative skills (Ovando, 1993). Anyone who has struggled to learn a foreign language can appreciate the difficulty students with limited English proficiency must have in keeping up with a classroom lecture, which offers fewer contextual cues and demands a higher level of linguistic precision than most interpersonal verbal communication. (Ovando, 1993).
Students with learning disabilities represent a third group of learners who may be at a disadvantage with language -based instruction. Some learners have difficulty reading, but are careful listeners and remember well what they have been told. Other learners may have great difficulty interpreting and understanding verbal instructions, especially when they are lengthy and complex. The diagnosis and categorization of these hidden disabilities has undergone substantial change in recent years (Heward & Cavanaugh, 1993) and strategies for adapting instruction for these learners are still being developed. Such developments may be to the advantage of all learners, as evidenced by the example of simplified sewing instructions that "the teacher decided . . .would be better for all her students" ( Heward, et al., 1993.)
When learning styles are described in terms of sensory input (visual, auditory, kinesthetic/haptic) many people describe themselves as visual learners. Why is visual learning so predominant? One possible explanation can be found in terms of human development, for as Berger (1977) has stated, "Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak." Instructional materials intended for very young children are typically highly visual, from the picture dictionaries first published in English in 1659 (Randhawa & Coffman, 1978) to instructions for assembling Lego blocks.
This precedence of visual learning before language-based learning is a recapitulation of the evolution of our species. We have descended from day-active primates in an arboreal world of colorful fruits and flowers which we moved through depending on highly accurate stereoscopic vision to keep from falling out of trees. During evolutionary development not only the ocular system but the visual cortex became more highly developed and complex in primates (even without including humans) than in mammals that rely more heavily on scent and sound. This visual-cognitive development enabled early hominids to use visual cues for social communication, develop mental maps of their territories, and learn to make and use tools through observation. "Thanks above all to the superior visual data-processing and integrating capacities . . . the way was paved for the emergence of conceptual thinking." (Randhawa et al., 1978.)
The leap from visual to conceptual thinking may seem like a long one, but consider again the developmental and evolutionary evidence. When Piaget strove to comprehend the development of abstract reasoning in children, he described the first step as the behavior of infants that demonstrated object permanence, the knowledge that an object blocked from view is still there. The second step he described was the beginning of symbolic representation, expressed behaviorally in drawings and verbal language (Scarr & Vander Zanden, 1984.)
The evolutionary beginnings of drawing as symbolic representation dates back to the Paleolithic Age 30,000 years ago, when our ancestors portrayed realistic drawings of animals as well as geometric patterns on cave walls. In contrast, the first evidence of a nonpictorial written language appeared in southern Iraq a mere 5,500 years ago (Randhawa, 1978.) Even when written language became more important and widespread in human culture, universal literacy was not always acheived, or even attempted. In the preindustrial world learning was primarily accomplished in an apprenticeship mode, and while this method certainly included verbal instruction, it emphasized observation and practice.
The Age of Reason has been considered the beginning of modernity, when literacy increased and the rise of industrialism created a stronger middle class. This era marked the transition from an oral-visual to a rational-linguistic culture in the West (Stafford, 1994.) In the eighteenth century the use of visual media shifted from religious symbolism to "mathematical recreations" such as optical illusions, intricate geometric illustrations, and "automata" such as the magic lantern picture projection device designed to mix "sensory pleasure with intellectual profit (Stafford, 1994.) Their early explorations of scientific and perceptual principles lead to inventions such as the still camera, the illusion of motion through animation, and eventually to the motion picture camera. The amateur mathematician George Boole developed the form of logic that underlies modern computer science while Lady Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage conceptualized the "difference engine," forerunner of the computer, in the early nineteenth century (Kaufmann & Smarr, 1993.)
It is tempting to rely on visual materials for learners from language bases other than English, and they are certainly useful for this purpose. However, language is not the only cultural difference among diverse peoples, and care must be taken that we do not assume that learners' visual communications are all the same despite differences in their verbal communications. This pitfall has been defined as "phenomenal absolutism . . . one ubiquitous and misleading attribute of naíve conscious experience, namely, that the world is at it appears" (Segal, Campbell, and Herkovits, 1966.) Educators cannot afford an assumption that ignores extensive research into the effects of culture, environment, and learning on visual perception (Coren, Porac, & Ward, 1978.)
As early as 1901, data were published showing cross-cultural differences in susceptability to optical illusions (Segal, et al., 1966.) Early experiments in perception uncovered perceptual differences between field-dependence and field-independence, which relates to the ability of an individual to see a figure embedded in a complex background. Later researchers found correlations between this perceptual difference and personality traits, with field independent people being characterized as more individualistic and field dependent people more socially dependent and senstive to their surroundings (Coren, et al., 1978.) Further research has tied cultural differences to perceptual style, with the finding that African American, Mexican American, and southest Asian immigrant learners tend to be field dependent while Anglo and native American learners tend to field independent (Shade & New, 1993.)
From 1956 - 1961 Segal, et al. (1966) collected data on the responses to classic optical illusions of 1,878 subjects, including 13 samples of people from non-Western cultures (12 in Africa, 1 in the Phillipines) and three samples of Western peoples (2 in the U.S., 1 from South Africans of European descent) with the intent of testing the "ecological cue validity" and learned patterns of inference regarding visual material . The greatest perceptual differences between Western and non-Western peoples were demonstrated with the Sander parallelogram and the Mueller-Lyer illusion, both illusions that play on the tendency among people living in environments primarily constructed with rectangular shapes to perceive objects with obtuse or acute angles as rectangular shapes seen from different perspective - in other words, to mentally make rectangles where they do not exist. Their work supports the concept that visual perception is learned and culturally influenced.
If simple line drawings are seen differently by different people, consider the vast differences that can arise in symbolic representation. When shown a swastika, most members of Western culture would immediately think of Nazi regime and all the horrors that it perpetrated. Yet the swastika is an example of what Wileman (1980) calls an arbitrary graphic, an image with no pictorial connection to what it represents. There is no reason for a person unfamiliar with the history of World War II to think of concentration camps when shown a swastika. Some visual symbols, such as the yin-yang diagram, have entered Western awareness from other cultures while other symbols immediately recognizeable in non-Western cultures may mean nothing to us. Colors as well as graphics carry different meanings for different peoples, as illustrated by the fact that the Chinese wear white to funerals and black to weddings. Despite the Jungian emphasis on the universality of visual symbols (Jung, 1964) it is apparent that responses to visual images differ across cultures and that learners "must be taught to 'read' the language of visual messages just as they are taught to read verbal messages" (Wileman, 1980.)
A study of linguistics supports the tie between visualization and reasoning for we so often say "I see" when we mean "I understand" and "let me draw you a picture" when we mean "let me clarify this" that we hardly notice the substitution (Wileman, 1980.) Both language and drawing are important means of symbolic representation, and when language fails, visual communication is relied upon. Consider the disparate examples of American Sign Language for people who cannot hear, augmentative communication boards using picture symbols for people who cannot speak, and international graphic symbols for people who do not speak each others's language.
Even when people are capable of and competent in linguistic communication, visual communication remains vital, and in some disciplines it is essential. We assume that images are important for art education, but tend to forget the role of visualization in math and science. Einstein reported that he "rarely thought in words at all" and that his thinking process were represented by "more or less clear images." (Randhawa, 1978.) Modern science relies on supercomputers that can process trillions of calculations per second to "replace the physical world with a digital reality" that can be mapped and displayed in ways that help human comprehend the complexity of natural phenomena (Kaufmann, et al., 1993.)
The predominance of Asian students in terms of mathematics test scores in world-wide comparisons of academic acheivement has been often quoted but perhaps insufficiently analyzed. Li, Sano and Merwin (1996) conducted testing of Japanese, Chinese, and U.S. junior high students in the areas of perception, verbal reasoning, and numerical reasoning and found the expected Asian superiority in math scores but also found that the two Asian groups were stronger on two tests of nonverbal ability, the Hidden Pattern and Figure Classification tests. The authors discussed the cultural differences that could contribute to these results, such as the emphasis in Asian education on nonverbal perceptual - manual tasks like origami.
Is there a causal relationship between high perceptual and mathematical abilities? Jerome Bruner (1979) emphasized the need for "manipulation and representation" in teaching mathematics. Mathematics education at the college level is becoming increasingly dependent on computer graphics, allowing the Downtown Campus of Pima Community College to receive a grant from the National Science Foundation for a computer classroom to be devoted to the instruction of college algebra and statistics using mathematical visualization software. For younger learners computers are used for graphing mathematics as well as for visually simulating naturally occuring phenomena (Taylor, 1996.) Further investigation of the link between visual-perceptual education and higher acheivement in mathematics should be researched.
Instructional design theory emphasizes selecting the media "which most effectively conveys the essential stimuli to the learner" (Wong & Raulerson, 1974) and advocates the use of visual materials to teach relational concepts. Wileman (1980) asserts that visual messages can be attention-getting, efficient, and effective and lists twelve types of educational messages that lend themselves to visual representation. They include concrete facts; step by step directions, processes, numerical data, comparative data, organizational structures, places, chronologies or timelines, diagrams of generalizations or theories, and representations of feelings or attitudes.
Graphics can be remarkably efficient communication tools. In teaching computer workshops I have found that it takes a surprisingly large number of imprecise words to describe the icons used in graphically based computer software, so it is much easier to show than to tell someone how to use them. When Stephen Jobs (1996) first saw a graphical user interface at Xerox PARC in 1979, "it was obvious [to him] that every computer in the world would work this way someday." Stafford (1994) asserts that "no one who has watched the computer graphics and interactive techniques revolution can doubt that we are returning to an oral-visual culture."
The saying that "a picture is worth a thousand words" has not remained popular for naught. There are some messages that lend themselves to direct visual representation, such as the anatomy of the human brain or a map of the U.S., while others may lend themselves to conceptual representation, such as a diagram of Maslow's heirarchy of needs or flow chart of the instructional design process. The process of conceptualizing visual materials to convey information is a complex and creative task (Wileman, 1980) and is far too challenging to be withheld from students. The use of visualization methods like mind mapping (Margulies, 1995) can stimulate students to think about the features and relationships of any content area differently than they may otherwise have considered.
To return to the original question on why develop and use visual materials for teaching, we can answer that visual learning is not just a recent fad but is firmly rooted in the history and psychology of human learning. Visual communication "is capable of of disseminating knowledge more effectively than almost any other vehicle of communication" (Wileman, 1980.) When visual materials are used in schools, students learn how to read maps, understand graphs, and comprehend the nature of phenomena too distant, too vast or too microscopic to be seen directly. They are also learning to read the graphical symbolic language of our culture, a language that must be understood in order to function effectively in our society - just try to get a driver's license without being able to interpret visual symbols! Visual literacy is not intended to supplant linguistic literacy, but to support and enhance it. As educators we must literally get back to the drawing board - or the computer or television screen - to develop visual materials for instruction.